The Green Integer Blog supplements our Green Integer website with essays on various cultural topics by editor/publisher Douglas Messerli, along with a listing of Green Integer titles and information on our new books. Please note that all essays and commentary are copyrighted by the author, Douglas Messerli, and may not be republished without permission.

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Monday, July 14, 2014

"The Mad Camerman" (on Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera)

Appearing in
1929, the same year as Dovzhenko’s Arsenal, Vertov’s important experimental “documentary” featuring the Ukrainian
city of Odessa— suddenly became apparent to me—would be a natural companion to
the works printed above. Below is a review-essay I wrote about this film in
2012. The fact that this adventuresome Russian director chose the Ukraine as
the subject of his major work seems to reiterate the intense relationships
between the former Soviet Union and Ukraine, and its presentation of the
bustling metropolis of Odessa, Ukraine’s third largest city, might help to
contextualize the current battles between the Putin and Porotshenko governments. Long described as a global
“the breadbasket” because of its rich and fertile soil, the Ukraine continues
to be of major significance in Europe.

Vertov had
randomly shot over 1,775 scenes, employing his wife Elizaveta Svilova to cut
and piece them together as a representation of a day in the life of a city (in
this case, Odessa) in 1929.

Certainly Man with a Movie Camera is intentionally experimental, using
numerous techniques from double exposures, slow motion, freeze frames, split
screens, close-ups, and long tracking shots to what is described as Dutch
angles, a tilt of the camera to the side creating vertical lines at an angle to
the frame.

Yet one certainly cannot describe this
documentary as being without narrative. It begins, in fact, with the above
manifesto as a kind prologue before showing, from within, a movie house, as the
crowd enters, the seats seeming to automatically fall from upright position to
the horizontal in long rows. The crowd is seated, a curtain rises, and an
orchestra is poised to begin as a short stasis creates tension before the
conductor brings down his baton on the Alloy Orchestra, a group which creates
not only a driving rhythmic music but incorporates sounds such as sirens, crowd
noise, the cries of babies and much else.

The narrative is made immediately
apparent, as a woman is seen sleeping upon a bed, an alarm clock blares, and
another woman sits up to wash her face and change into her dress. Although
Vertov's work begins rather slowly, it quickly picks up a speed that drives the
numerous daily routines, from traveling to work by bus, train, streetcar and
other modes of transportation to the masses' arrival into the heart of the city
where they begin their numerous daily routines that take us into the late
afternoon when the host of figures engage in multiple entertainments, including
theater, sunbathing, and various engagements in sport events.

At the center of this narrative is the central character, an almost
manic cameraman (Mikhail Kaufman) who with camera in hand hops upon various
forms of transportation, climbs bridges, and mounts machines, tracking scenes
from below and on high as he risks his life to capture the life and energy of
city living.

But, of course, we know that despite the
cameraman's busy demeanor that there is yet another camera trained on him, and
that, in fact, the film is not just a movie about a "man with a movie
camera," but is a more self-referential film, a movie about a movie maker.
The stars of this narrative are the cinematographer, Vertov himself, and the
tool he uses to accomplish the task. At one point the camera seems to actually
come alive, taking itself apart and reassembling its own being. At another
moment we witness the mad camera man atop his own camera. And again and again,
while the masses go about their daily chores, the cameraman and his camera race
across the screen to track the actions of the Soviet folk it—again mostly in a
pretense—"secretly" shoots. This is not exactly candid camera,
however, for although Vertov is said to have distracted several of crowds from
the fact that they were being filmed, the very outsized version of his machine
surely encouraged some of his figures to pose for the camera, or, to put it
another way, to "act."

Except for the statement of no
intertitles, accordingly, Vertov's manifesto seems to ignore what it claims to
have accomplished, creating instead a kind of theatrical narrative whose actors
are the cameraman and his camera among a cast of thousands of extras. No
matter, the film is still today one of the most remarkable documentaries ever
made, long ahead of its time using techniques that influenced 20th and
21st-century filmmaking.

If at times Man with a Movie Camera, particularly near the end, seems—as
Vertov's critics had argued—gimmicky and even manipulative, overall the work is
a remarkable achievement, representing as it does a vast landscape of pulsing
city life.